Researchers Rob Ragan and Oscar Salazar have built a free LiteCoin-mining botnet that generates $US1750 a week using free cloud signup promotions.
The pair will outline the exploit at Black Hat next month, but have blabbed to Wired about how they used automatic tools and processes to spread a currency-mining botnet across some …

COMMENTS

Sounds

kind of abusive. It wouldn't surprise me if they got into legal trouble...

On the other hand, El Reg: Have you still not learned, that Bitcoin is written with lower case 'c' and is also not generatable on "graphical processing units"?

Even if these cloudservers had GPUs available for processing, it would likely cost the Researchers more in internet connectivity costs if they were to mine bitcoins. Due to the trials being free, obviously, Litecoin still has the capability of being profitable (near zero costs, non-zero income) yet there would be wiser choices as to what to do with the time they spent on creating this.

I did not know there *were* that many cloud providers. Or are they

Re: I did not know there *were* that many cloud providers. Or are they

I wondered that too.

From the article (which refers to them as 'hackers' *sigh*):

Companies like Google, Heroku, Cloud Foundry, CloudBees, and many more offer developers the ability to host their applications on servers in faraway data centers, often reselling computing resources owned by companies like Amazon and Rackspace. Ragan and Salazar tested the account creation process for more than 150 of those services. Only a third of them required any credentials beyond an email address—additional information like a credit card, phone number, or filling out a captcha. Choosing among the easy two-thirds, they targeted about 15 services that let them sign up for a free account or a free trial. The researchers won’t name those vulnerable services, to avoid helping malicious hackers follow in their footsteps.

Maths failure?

The pair will outline the exploit at Black Hat next month, but have blabbed to Wired about how they used automatic tools and processes to spread a currency-mining botnet across some 150 popular free services that each generated about 25 cents a day -- all on the providers' electricity bill."